Conversation [ Communication / Education / Social interaction / Language & Speech ]
… Gentlemen (London: J. Hoyles, 1738), p. 90. As conversation was not just talk and ‘could function as a metonym for all kinds of social interaction’, it could be defined in a variety of ways. 3 Ideally, conversation was polite and pleasing, … echoing the ongoing desire to fashion an English politeness. Polite conversation could now be regarded as a ‘specious kind of Lies', an ‘enslavement to foreign manners’, alien to the British character, while English conversation was characterised by plain speaking and sincerity. Such critiques occasioned debates about language, masculinity and identity and fuelled the cultural …
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